The Big Yellow Schoolhouse: 5 and 6

                           

Bill

From fifth to ninth grades I walked the same route to school, down
Fairmount Hill, over the Neponset River, across the railroad tracks, past the shops and stores in Cleary Square, to the same place, the William Barton Rogers Junior High School on Harvard Avenue in Hyde Park. For the first two of those years I was finishing up elementary school; for the last three I was a junior high schooler.  The school was made of yellow brick. "Where do you go to school," I am asked? “The Rogers. You know, that yellow brick building down to the square." It was a big yellow schoolhouse.

I went to my neighborhood school, the Fairmount, for fourth grade. With no additional room for a fifth and sixth grade at the Fairmount, the school department found two rooms for a fifth and sixth at the Rogers. All of us coming from fourth grade at the Fairmount now had a place to go. The Rogers essentially became a Fairmount annex for those two years. We may have been physically part of the Rogers but Fairmount School was the name on our report cards. (Not too long after I left, the Fairmount sacrificed its auditorium to accommodate makeshift fifth and sixth classrooms.)

In fourth grade I considered myself at the top of the grade school food chain. Can you be a senior in fourth grade if that is the highest-grade level in the school? Down at the Rogers I am at the bottom, starting all over again.

September of 1954.  I am out the door on a lovely warm morning. I should be running up to a friend's house to play.  It feels like all the other summer mornings I bounded out my kitchen door.  But it's not the same. There's been a shift, the same shift there is every September.  A familiar pattern is back in control of my life. Breakfast at a particular time, words like, "Finish your cereal. You don't want to be late for school,” heard over and over again, the new walk to school that becomes so familiar as each succeeding month blends into another. Late summer fades into fall, leaves glide off the trees, the warmth and the light retreat, heavy coats go on, hats that pull over the ears, the snow flies; then, just in time, a much needed break: the wonderful mid-winter glow of the holidays; in January it’s back to school, walking against the cold wind, feeling the chill of the bleak sun. Finally the great thaw, piles of snow trickle back into water, grass and leaves return; it's June. Summer is just over there.  I walk through it all.

My destination that first September was a small classroom tucked away down in the basement of the Rogers. The school was unfamiliar, as was the room, but the kids weren't.  Almost all of them were the same classmates I had at the Fairmount.  With them came the same problems and situations, the same smart kids, the same bullies, those familiar faces would be my steady companions all the way through high school. They tagged along with me; I tagged along with them.

And now we were all stuck together down here in the basement.

So on this first day of school I am walking along the sidewalk by the Rogers looking for the door that gets me to this new room. My older brother Ralph is an eighth-grader here.  He told me which door to use to get to where I need to go.  There it is.  I’m down the stairs, through the fire doors that must always be closed but often are not, and take a quick left into room 9 where I  begin my first school day at the Fairmount/Rogers.

I stayed in the same room all day but the junior high kids had English in one room and math or history somewhere else. Once an hour they were in the corridors going to their next class.  I used to imagine the whole junior high swirling around me. I heard them but never saw them. My classroom door had a window but it was covered with brown paper.  The corridor we were on led to the gymnasium.  Just outside the door there were the sounds of shuffling of feet, coughing, the occasional shout.  In our basement room we were hidden away from all the other kids in the building. I'm sure as they passed, if they even noticed, they took our room to be some sort of storage area.  I liked the occasional commotion of those kids outside. It made me feel less trapped, less cut off, less isolated.

Seating was alphabetical as usual.  I was a B, seated next to the side blackboard away from the windows.  It seemed darker on my side of the room especially in winter.  I envied the V's and the W's (We even had a couple of Z's.) over by the windows.

From the very first day of fifth grade, Mr. Howard, our teacher, would write a vocabulary word on the front blackboard.  This was known as busy work.  First thing in the morning, my preference would have been to slouch over the chairs, chat, catch up with my friends, but instead there was always something on the board we were required to work on until the teacher showed up.  I preferred the word assignments to the other forms of busy work that appeared on blackboards as I went from grade to grade.  I particularly despised the overly complex, multi-digit multiplication or division problems that would plague my early mornings in other classrooms.

One vocabulary word I remember was perseverance. The pattern was the same: look the word up in the dictionary, write out a definition, use it in a sentence, learn how to spell it: the usual tortuous convolutions that instead of endearing the English language to us often had the opposite effect of making it seem tedious and remote.

But I still liked the word perseverance. This had nothing to do with its meaning, this idea of tenacity, a persistent effort to accomplish something despite difficulties and obstacles. I wasn't quite sure what all that meant except for being aware perseverance was not one of my personal characteristics. My fondness for the word had to do with the way it was strung together, by its melodic cadence when you spoke it. It was a word that flowed off your tongue.  I was beginning to figure out vowels, where they fit in as part of the construction of words.  I loved that perseverance had a string of e’s in it.  It made it easier to spell.  Spelling "big" words was always challenging to me. As for a sentence, I would come up with something like, "You better have perseverance if you want to get good marks in school.” That sounds very much like me back then.

Walking into that fifth grade classroom, one of the first things I noticed was the clock.  It didn't work. I don't think it was even right twice a day. I didn't care about that.  I ate lunch when it was lunchtime.  I went home when the teacher said school was over.  What made the clock interesting were all the X’s, I’s and V's on the dial. Roman numerals.  Now that was an interesting concept. My "study" of roman numerals continued for a few years.  By junior high I had moved on to the big time, translating C's and M's on historic buildings into recognizable dates.  But it started in fifth grade with the clocks. I always considered myself a listless learner.  It could take a while for me to "get" something.  Part of the problem was lack of application on my part.  Somehow though clock faces inspired me.

I quickly learned that a V could be its own number, a five, or, depending on which side of the V an I or several I’s stood, it could be a four, six, seven or eight. Amazing! It was the same way with an X.  I remember how good it felt to figure out a different way of saying numbers.  Not ten, but X.  Some labeled Latin a dead language but the Roman numeral aspect of it was full of life as far as I was concerned.

It didn't stay September for long.  Mornings became chillier.  There was less light at night.  A routine began to establish itself at school. I began to get used to our teacher, his teaching style, whether he was a good teacher or one you had to be wary of.  The teacher was the only adult in a room full of kids.  They either liked kids or they didn’t.  I liked a teacher who liked kids.  Put up with them.  Joked with them.  Was forgiving of them.  Mr Howard was not as good in these aspects as my fourth grade teacher, Mr. Cronin, had been, but, he was a teacher I, eventually, could be comfortable with. 

Afternoons had a different pattern than mornings.  After lunch the pace seemed slower with everyone quietly working at their desks on a math exercise or figuring out which adjective was modifying which noun.  Looking up from my paper during those moments, I am struck by all the kids around me, usually fidgety, now oddly quiet. Not that all of them are concentrating on the task at hand. A few are staring into a corner of the room or looking out the window; there is always somebody doodling or spending an inordinate amount of time looking for something in their desks; one kid appears to be asleep.

I'd notice how different kids held their pencils, some almost parallel to their desks or straight up to the ceiling, their fingers at the very end or at the very tip.  A couple of kids struggled as if the pencil had a mind of its own.  One kid might have it stuck in his mouth in between using it.  Another would furiously erase everything she had just written and start over.

I had thirteen subjects listed on my fourth grade report card.  All that to do in five hours every day?  Hard to believe. (Maybe some were taught part of the year.) Some subjects were broken out. English included separate grades for reading and spelling. There was the usual history, geography and arithmetic. Then we had music, health education and something called nature study. There was manual training, we called it shop in later grades, and art. Penmanship always got ugly with me.  Finally physical education.  We never went to the gym. Was the teacher judging us on our skills or lack thereof outside on the schoolyard?  And with all the other subjects vying for his attention, where did he get the time! All this for about $4500 a year.

I am thinking that reading took place during the morning routine.  I'm not talking about the kind of reading where you sit at your desk, open a book and read to yourself.  This was reading out loud.  Whereas kids could hide their deficiencies in the other subjects, their lack of skills in reading was out in the open.  In both fifth and sixth grades the beginning of reading meant a mass movement of everyone in the room.  Good readers sat by the window, less good in the middle of the room  but the bad readers were most ostracized by moving to the rows farthest from the windows, and, consequently, farthest from the good readers. Your position in the room determined not only how good a reader you were but also gauged, to yourself in particular, how smart or dumb you were perceived to be.

There was little consideration given in those days to the issues of learning disabilities, dyslexia, even if a kid needed glasses.  You either read well from the get go or you sat with all the other struggling readers.

I didn't know anything about the probable causes of reading issues.  I was a good reader, in the first row, behind the handful of smart girls who were not only whizzes at reading but at every other subject as well. But I held my own with them when it came to reading aloud.  I was good at it, trying to make whatever I was reading as interesting and dramatic as I could.  I enjoyed doing it; trouble was, aware it was not an area in which I needed any help, the teacher rarely called on me to perform.

The kids furthest away from me got most of the attention. I wasn't very sympathetic to their plight. I would cringe when some of them were asked to read aloud.  I sat there listening to their long pauses, their struggles to sound out a word, their stammering.  "Just read the sentence already," I'd scream in my head. I'd almost rather do long division than have reading class.

A different teacher would show up once or twice a week for music class. He didn't have a name.  He was the music teacher.  He must have been related in some way to the person who came in a few times a week for art.  She was the art teacher.  Based on the pronouns I just used, I realize through the next few years of school, the music teacher was always a man, the art teacher always a woman. There is a graduate school gender role thesis in that fact somewhere.

Music had to do with singing, not playing a musical instrument.  Unless you count the odd little device the music teacher would always have with him.  His pitch pipe.  Whenever we would sing, he would take this small circular object out of his pocket and blow into it, eliciting a pleasing musical sound not unlike a harmonica. The trouble is I had no idea how this sound in any way related to what we were about to sing.

It's easy enough to look up pitch pipe online. Its function is to provide a pitch reference to a group of musicians so they all begin a piece of music in relatively the same key.  That’s great if you are members of the Boston Symphony.  We were just a bunch of kids.  I knew nothing about chromatic scales, keys, pitches or anything else.  I didn’t even know if I sang in tune.   But somehow when the music teacher blew into his little device, I felt better. It put me in the mood to sing.  The sound filled the room, creating a much more peaceful and certainly more agreeable atmosphere than one in which a teacher is droning on about how to do long division or some kid is in the back row struggling to read a phrase like, well, “agreeable atmosphere”.

Morning would be broken up by the delivery of milk for lunch. There would be a rustling at the door. A couple of kids, always boys, sixth graders from upstairs, would bring in a couple of wooden cases, the tops covered with a thin layer of dirty crushed ice, push them in the corner where they would sit for an hour or so.  Cold milk for lunch, even moderately cool milk, was never a possibility.

Lunch was the transition between morning activities and the slower pace of the afternoon. As in all the other grades, we ate at our desks. Bolted to the floor.  Very old school. No oil cloths to protect the desks though.  Maybe the desks were made of more resilient materials than the old wooden ones we had at the Ellis Mendell.   

I'd clear off the top of the desk, stowing whatever I was involved with inside, and pull out my lunch in its disabused paper bag.  My mother was frugal.  She had me bring home my lunch bag everyday so she could reuse it the next day, and the next, as long as it would hold up.   My folding it up after lunch and squeezing it into my back pocket helped account for its deteriorated condition by the end of the week.  I envied some of the other kids who at the end of lunch swept everything, bits of food, waxed paper, their lunch bag, into the waste basket and were done with it, while I was at my seat refolding my bag so my mother could, maybe, get one more use out it tomorrow.

Some kids had lunch boxes.  I'd see them on their desks.  Green or red metal things with pictures of Hopalong Cassidy holding a gun hiding behind a cactus, or the Lone Ranger streaking by on Silver.  The year I began sixth grade Davy Crocket was popular as a lunch box trend.  Inside some of the lunch boxes there was a thermos.  Those kids could bring along their own milk, and it was cold! The lucky ones might even have Zarex or Kool Aid to drink with their lunches.

I made due with my carton of tepid milk with the added satisfaction of it tasting faintly like its waxed container. In my frugal paper bag I'd find a peanut butter and grape jam sandwich, or maybe one with baloney between the two slices of Wonder bread, or even a cream cheese and olive sandwich which was something I actually liked. Sometimes there'd be a pear or a plum, and a few chocolate chip cookies or a piece of bar cake.

Every once in a while I'd find a Hostess Cupcake. These came two to a package but my mother packed only one in my lunch.  (The other would have gone to one or the other of my brothers.)  Along with a topping of chocolate frosting, there was a squiggle of white piping down the middle. Eating this classic snack became a ritual for me. First I'd peel off the frosting, break it into smaller pieces and put the ones that were all chocolate on one side of my desk, and the ones that were frosted with bits of the white squiggle on another part of the desk.  It gets more ridiculous.  I tore the cupcake into as many small pieces as I could with my hands, and then stick a bit from the pile of just chocolate frosting into the center cream before eating that piece.  When the cupcake was gone I'd eat the rest of the chocolate frosting with the white squiggle on it. A touch of obsessive behavior may have prevailed upon my lunchtime but there was another reason: a calming routine I needed before my performance in front of the class as Joe Friday in Dragnet.

Social anxiety can be a crippling impediment to some, an obstacle to success. In fifth grade it was difficult enough to stand up to speak by your desk when a teacher asked a question.  I couldn't conceive of one of my classmates being asked to speak in front of the class. And yet, every couple of weeks, I and a few friends would get up in front of the class after lunch to put on a Dragnet show I had written.  Anxiety wasn't a factor. I didn’t do this alone. I had a company of fellow actors: someone to play Frank, my partner, someone who would be the witness to the crime, and someone to be the perpetrator of the crime, or as I would call him, the crook. Why no anxiety? It’s likely I disappeared into my character of Joe Friday, the tough, no nonsense cop. However I rationalized my misgivings about the potential of making a fool of myself in front of the class, my desire to perform these little plays overcame it.

Read the blog entry Gene's Yard for an idea of my earlier play-writing skills.  The Dragnets began as a something to do after completing an assignment in school.  I drew upon my experience watching Dragnet at home with my family on Thursday nights. Was plagiarism one of my before school words?  The plots of my little plays were inspired by the definitive style of the show.  Everyone knew it.  The music.  Dum Dee Dum Dum!  The cadence. "This is the city.  My name's Friday.  I'm a cop." It certainly lent itself to satire.  Ask Stan Freberg.  I wasn’t trying for parody but it snuck in anyway.

After I had written a few, I shared them with some friends who thought we should put them on "for the whole school."  "Let's ask the teacher."  He didn't have any objections, so one afternoon after the empty milk cartons had been discarded and the Superman lunch boxes put away, my version of Dragnet premiered in front of this captive audience of fifth graders.

I remember very clearly standing in front of the class holding the two page script I had written, a kid next to me playing my partner and another kid on the other side of me who would play the bad guy or witness, sometimes both, or just do the sound effects and music.  I only had one copy of the script so each of them had to huddle next to me to read their lines and see their cues.

“This the city,” a typical script would begin. “Los Angeles, California. I work here. I’m a cop.”  Each of the little plays would then go into the specifics of a particular case that would, astoundingly, be solved within about 4 minutes.

“It was Saturday, August 19. I was working the day watch on a hit and run.  The boss is Captain Smith. My partner is Frank Smith.  (Are they related?) My name is Friday.  A man had hit an eight year-old boy.  It was our job to get him.”  (Who?  The boy or the driver.  Wonderful ambiguity.)

Then the famous music.  Dum, dee, dum dum.  There was one kid who did that pretty well, lots of emphasis.  But he only did it when he felt like it.  Like  a lot of actors, he was temperamental.  

This particular episode starts off with Frank and Joe in their office  On the TV show, the office talk was often trivial as the producers tried to give Joe, an often enigmatic, taciturn, even straight-laced character, some personality.  I tried to do the same thing.

Frank.  “Did you see that picture that’s playing at the theatre down town?”

Joe. “No.  Did you?”

Frank. “Yeah. I took the wife last night.  It’s a good picture.  The name of it is ‘The Glass Slipper.’ MGM made it.”

Joe. “That so.”

Frank. “Yeah.”

Then the phone would ring or the captain would come in to get them back on the case.

I thought it was important to employ these little non sequitur scenes as a way to get my audience’s mind off the plot before quickly returning to it again.  Just like they did on the show.

Another script, in which Joe and Frank are looking for a teenager robbing stores, begins in the kitchen of Frank’s house where Frank is cooking Joe bacon and eggs for breakfast.

“Looks good,” says Joe.

“It is. I put a new flavor in.” answers Frank.

Joe. “I hope it isn’t like the other flavor.”

Frank. “Why, didn’t you like the other flavor?”

Joe. “No.”

Frank. “Taste this one”

Joe. “Alright. (Pause)  Eeeeeee.”

Frank. “It can’t be as bad as that.”

Joe. “It is.”

Then the telephone rings and we’re back on the case.  I assumed kids laughed during the breakfast bit.  It’s a class of nine year-olds who have no where else to go..  It’s not penmanship class.  They’ll laugh at anything.  Likely even the stuff I thought was serious.

In the breakfast episode, Joe and Frank are called to the scene of the latest robbery.  The narrator, a person in the script identified only as “me”, describes “the place as a mess. The front window was smashed out.”

The proprietor, in the script he’s known only as “man”, tells Joe and Frank that “a boy comes in here. He holds up a note. ‘Let’s have the money.’ I give it to him.  Then he throws a bottle through the window.  Then runs. He dropped the note on the floor.”

Joe. “Was it anything important?’ 

Man. “It must be. It has his address on it.”

Well if that didn’t get a laugh, of the incredulous kind, I don’t know what would.

Based on the address on the note, (Some very perceptive detective work going on here.) they track the kid down. Once confronted he quickly confesses. In about two seconds.  (Hey, I only had about five minutes before it was time for spelling.) “Alright, I robbed the place.” Case closed.

The little plays had these three main elements.  The humor at the beginning, the witness or the victim talking to Frank and Joe and the quick capture and questioning of the often very dumb perpetrator.  This was long before Miranda rights.

In the hit and run episode, Frank gets a tip as to where the driver is.  There is actually a gun battle in this one. 

Joe. “Come on out. You’ll never get away.”

Crook. (By labelling the person a ‘crook’ right off the bat it was obvious I had never heard of Miranda rights either.) “Shut up, you dirty flatfoots!”

Well, that’s not going to go over too well. The “crook” runs out of bullets and is dragged downtown for interrogation.

Joe. “What’s your name?”

Crook. “Which one.”

Joe. “Stop the funny stuff!”

Crook. Alright, I hit the kid. Now, shut up.”

Joe. “Take him away.”

That was that.  I finish with a short paragraph, hopefully read in the same pompous way as on the show, about trial “being held in superior court in and for the county of Los Angeles”.  Peter Walk, the crook’s name apparently, was given a sentence of twenty years.  Mr Walk, you never should have told Joe Friday to “Shut up, you dirty flatfoot!”

In my neighborhood in Hyde Park, and in Gin’s in Pittsfield, there were little variety stores on every corner it seemed.  Maybe this is why another episode of  Dragnet featured a teenage kid not only robbing stores but blowing them up as well.  Did someone give him a hard time once over penny candy choices?  As Joe put it in the prologue, “It was our job to find him.” Alright, Joe.  You got five minutes. 

First the humor.

Joe. “Any calls, Frank?”

Frank. “Yeah. A guy called. He put a penny in a gum ball machine and didn’t get any gum.  So he’s suing the company.”

Joe. “Is that so. For how much?”

Frank. “A penny.”

Back to the case.

This one moves fast.  A phone call. A woman says the teenager is at her house. Joe and Frank show up with guns drawn.

Joe. “Hands up!”

Frank. “Look out!”

sound effects. Bang! Bang!

Frank. “Get out of that garage!”

Crook. (Here we go again.) “Going to make me?”

sound. Bang!

Crook. “You’ll never get me alive!”

Frank. “His gun’s empty.”

Joe. “Take him!”

Crook. “I give up.”

Downtown, the suspect (I use that term loosely.) is questioned.

Joe. “What’s your name?”

Crook. “Captain Nemo.”  (The Disney movie Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea was big at the time.)

Joe. “Stop the funny business.”  (Where have we heard this dialogue before?)

A witness shows up, identifies the kid as the bomber.  The boy confesses.  Done deal. Five years in prison.

In these scenes I was trying to emulate the staccato style of dialogue that Dragnet was known for.  “Yes, ma’m.  Just the facts, ma’m.”  That clipped dialogue, the noir lighting, the no nonsense style, all of this contributed to giving the TV show a surreal feel at times.  I couldn’t define it but the surreal was a part of my life everyday.  It was a part of everyone’s.  It’s an odd world.  The Dragnet and my Dragnets certainly reflected that.

On another in the classroom series, Joe wins a quiz show. Another day watch. This time looking for a guy robbing “doctors of medicine”.

Telephone rings.

Joe. “I’ll get it. Hello. What? Oh. Hold the line please. Frank?”

Frank. “Yeah.”

Joe. “How many stomachs does a cow have?”

Frank. “Five.”

Joe. (Into the phone.) “Five.”  (Pause)  “Yahoo! Goodbye.”

Frank. “Who was it?”

Joe. “A quiz show. I won two hundred dollars!”

Frank. “Wow.”

Among others things, the most absurd aspect of that scene was Joe yelling the word “yahoo”. 

On the original Dragnet, Joe could get self-righteous, let a suspect have it.  After one of these rants, the crook it was aimed at would always break down and confess. A case I wrote involved a 19 year-old boy who had been pushed to his death out a window.  The break in the case came from a woman who called the office saying she “knows who the killer is”.

At her apartment, the lady invites the two cops in.

Lady. “The man who I think killed the boy is my husband.”

Me. “Den, den.”  (Musical punctuation. A variant on the main theme.  Just for emphasis.  Now that I think of it, with these musical bridges, often done by me, I was living my nightmare, “singing” in front of the class.)

Frank. “Why do you suspect your husband?”

Lady. “He told me.”

Wait a minute.  This woman can’t be forced to testify against her husband, can she?  I guess with just a few minutes between the end of lunch and the beginning of spelling, I didn’t have time to indulge the basic rules of law.

So, next scene, this poor unfortunate is under the bright light of Joe’s interrogation.

Joe. “What’s your name?’ 

Crook. “Superman.”

Joe. “Listen you. I heard a lot from robbers, murderers, young punks who go around beating people up. But this tops it by far. Now what did you do it for!”

Well, not wishing to incur any more of Joe’s withering wrath, the crook confesses.

Crook. “He wouldn’t give me the money. Now shut up!”

Joe. “Take him away.”

Joe really sounds disgusted.  I hope I gave that scene justice in my acting.  It sounded like a two Hostess Cupcake day to me.

An interesting conclusion to this case.  No trial “in and for the county of Los Angeles.” Instead, “Robert Willow was checked by four doctors and found to be mental.” Maybe Joe drove him crazy.

This began a trend.  In the next two plays mental illness becomes a plot point.

“This the city. Los Angeles, California. I work here. I’m a cop. It was Saturday, February 29. (Leap day!?)  I was working the day watch on a murder detail. The boss is Captain Stab Brown. (Did I come up with that name or did it come from the show?) My partner’s Frank Smith.  My name’s Friday. A man had been going around killing people. We believed he was mental. Anyway, it was our job to get him.”

Cue music.  Dum, de, etc.

A call comes into the office.  There’s some confusion on the phone.

Joe. “Talk louder, I can’t hear you. Hello, hello!”

Frank. “What happened?”

Joe. “I don’t know but we better get over to 100,001 Hollywood Boulevard now.”

Alright.  What is with that number?  One hundred thousand and one Hollywood Boulevard.  No idea where I pulled that out from.  Surrealism strikes again.

Joe and Frank aren’t as concerned about the street number as they are about the “lady who was hanging out a smashed window” at that address. 

Joe. “Sure is a mess, isn’t she, Frank.”

Frank. “Yeah.”

Enough of this complex, insightful dialogue.  Back to the office.

Another phone call. (I wonder if the same kid who did the gunshot effects also did the phone call rings.)

Frank.  “I got it. Hello. Yes. 150 Rabbit Street. We’ll be right over.”

Rabbit Street?  Sounds mental to me.

150 Rabbit Street is the address of a bar.  Inside is the suspect, or, more aptly named, the crook.

Joe. “Alright, hands up.”

Crook. “What de heck…”

Joe. “Come on.”

Crook. “You gonna make me.” 

Joe. “Yeah.”

sound effect. Sock!

Crook. “Oooohhhh!”

Joe, “Now, c’mon.”

A fight scene.  Effectively and efficiently staged for my fifth grade classmates.

We jump right to the trial.  I guess Joe and Frank did not care to question an obviously mentally ill man.

Back to superior court where “Dick Carson was found mental.” 

The last words on the page say it all in huge letters.  THE END.

Frank the cook makes another appearance in the next play.  Again, in the office.

Frank. “Say, Joe, did you ever taste homemade tomato soup?”

Joe. “No, did you?”

Frank. “Sure.  I made some.”

Joe. “Oh.”

Frank. “Say, Joe, how about coming over for dinner tonight?’

Joe. “Well, uh, mmmmm, I might not be able to make it.”

Frank. “If you can, c’mon over.”

Joe dodges a different kind of bullet.

A man comes in claiming to know who killed a man found dead in a gutter, the current case. 

Frank. “Who do you suspect?”

Man. “My brother.”

Joe. “Why do you suspect your brother?”

Man. “He just broke out of a mental hospital.”

It would be nice to say that even at age ten I had a more progressive view of people who were struggling with mental diseases.  Apparently not.  If you go by my Dragnets, all mentally ill people were killers.  What a world I lived in.

The case has a quick resolution. Joe and Frank find the suspect at a local hotel.

Joe. “Alright. Hands up!”

Crook. (Not even mentally ill crook.) “Get out of here.”

Joe. “C’mon, let’s go.”

Crook. “I won’t.”

Frank. “Come on.”

Crook. “OK.” 

No gunfire or fists to the face.  Crook must have known he had no chance.

Surprisingly once downtown crook confesses. The final disposition “in and for the county of Los Angeles” was summarized in one stunning sentence.

“Robert Petty was sent back to the mental hospital.” Justice served once again.

I think my favorite was the one about the counterfeiters. I may have noticed some of the kids falling asleep during my presentations because in this one I cranked up the action.

At the office, Frank and Joe find someone waiting for them “in the investigation room.”  It’s a nine year-old boy.

Joe. “What do you want, son?”

Boy. “I think I know who’s been making the money.”

Joe. “Who, son?”

Boy. “It’s my…”

Frank suddenly yells, “Look out, Joe!” 

Sound effect person has his hands full.  “Crash. Bang! Bang!”

Joe starts yelling for everyone to “Get down!”

Frank takes charge. “Officer Liney, cover the back windows!”

Whoever took a shot at the kid is captured.  It turns out he is one of the counterfeiters.  It’s all down hill from here.  At the address given to them, Joe and Frank find a printing layout and “the most important thing, the plates.”  I certainly knew a lot about crime.  I’m watching way too much TV apparently.

There is a long stake out, another gun battle and the capture of the rest of the gang.  The interrogation is anticlimactic consisting mostly of the crooks’ refusing to give their names.

Joe. “What’s your name?”

First crook. “I forgot.”

Joe. “What’s your name?”

Second crook. “I forgot too.”

Well, this goes on for a while.  I guess I expended the effects budget with the two action scenes.  Eventually everyone confesses to making the funny money and, at that familiar superior court “in and for the county of Los Angeles,” the crooks are sentenced, each receiving exactly twenty nine years.  I must have come up with that number based on my research into federal sentencing guidelines for infractions of the US Treasury code.  Or not.

I don’t recall much feedback from my captive audience. Hopefully a smattering of occasional applause.  There is a cryptic note, however, on one of the script pages. Joe has given his card to a witness for him to call if he thinks of anything else.  The classic cliche in all cop shows. The witness’ response is, “Righto.” The word is from the Beat culture that was prevalent at the time although it doesn’t sound like a word I would use in my everyday life. At the bottom of the page on which the word appears, someone had written, very neatly in pen, “dig it, C.A.” I don’t know who C.A. is. Maybe someone who had read the script before or after it had been performed.  Whoever he or she was, thanks.  I dig it that you dug it.

By the way, all the above quotes from the Dragnet plays come from the original scripts which I have kept all these years.  They are on brown lined paper, once likely whiter, written in pencil in my crappy penmanship.  Looking at them now, sixty years later,  they seem more surreal than ever. Even more so that I now live in Los Angeles. The city.  Dum, dee, dum, dum.

There was something worse than sitting in that classroom, doing math or attempting to read or even watching a Dragnet play. (“Not that damn kid again with another stupid Joe Friday thing!”) At least in the classroom there was something to do.  We didn’t have that option when it was announced there would be an air raid drill. It meant the basement.

Even though our classroom was in the basement, one side of the room had large windows looking out onto the street. The school was built on a hill so part of it was below ground. When the order to evacuate was given, we walked out into the corridor, past the boys’ and girls’ rooms, into a darker part of the building.  It was on the same level as my classroom, but seemed much gloomier, more confined, with fewer, smaller, windows. 

There we stayed until the all clear.  Not a siren.  That would have been fun.  Just a teacher telling us we could go back to our rooms now. Unlike the Mendell, (See blog entry School Days.) where we sat next to the wall in a corridor, here in the basement we stood.  No talking, of course.  We just stood for what to me, a nine year-old kid, was a very long time.  Boys were grouped together in rows, the girls near us in separate rows.  I wasn’t anxious.  I never for a moment thought the Russians were actually going to attack us. (As it turned out in 1955 they didn’t have the capability to send planes over the ocean, or the North Pole, and it would be years before a missile launch was even feasible.) Mostly I was bored, and tired.  Tired of standing.  I quickly became restless. 

I’d look around at the space I was in.  Empty mostly.  Large posts near us holding the school up.  I looked at the clothes everyone was wearing.  You could not wear jeans in those days.  Most of the boys, if it were spring, would have on short-sleeved shirts.  I’d look over at the girls.  Some wore dresses. Most wore skirts, paired with some kind of blouse, often white with small collars, some printed with animals or flowers, some with sweaters. Then just looking off into space. Shifting from leg to leg.  Waiting.  

Finally the all clear.  Unfortunately our classroom was not filled with rubble so it was back to our desks to continue with whatever we had been doing before the request to “leave the classroom in an orderly fashion.  No talking. Move quickly but safely.”  Now it’s time to do penmanship. In an orderly fashion. No talking. Write slowly and neatly.  There was never an all clear for penmanship.

While air raid drills were usually announced ahead of time, fire drills were different.  You could have your head low on your desk, concentrating on an arithmetic problem or wrestling with a spelling word, or trying to sneak in a quick nap, when a shrill squawking would fill the room.  Your head would bolt up. Fire alarm!

Almost as a group everyone jumped out of their seats and headed toward the door.  No one was concerned that the school was burning down. No, this was an opportunity to go outside during the school day! The teacher had to quickly rein us in or a bunch of us would get stuck in the doorway.  “Single file.  Single file.” Again, no one for a second thought there was an actual fire. To me the fire drill had nothing to do with a fire.  It was all about movement. The fire alarm went off.  You suddenly had the freedom to move.  Out the door. Into the corridor. Up the stairs. Outside.  And you could sort of half run.  After all no one wanted to get burned by the imaginary flames.

Once outside we would mass together on the sidewalk. There was a sense of excitement about the whole process, giddiness.  Here we are outside in the middle of the day on the sidewalk. No talking but everyone did anyway.  “We could walk home.  No one would even know.” “Do you smell smoke?” “This is great.” “I’m hungry.”  “I’m cold.”

I liked being outside like this.  I didn’t have my jacket which made it even more unusual, and fun. I could hear the fire alarm, somewhat muffled, still going off inside the building.  Every once in a while I’d hear sirens. Fire trucks would show up as part of the drill.  This couldn’t get any better.  Unless the school burned down.  It never did.  Some kids would groan when the alarms inside the school abruptly stopped.  We would march back in, considerably less enthused than when we tumbled out. Our unexpected break was over.  But no matter how long we waited on the sidewalk it was much better than being in that dark dingy basement.

The days of being taught in the basement classroom were numbered as the flowers began to blossom and the trees leafed out.  It’s June, 1955.  I have a great summer ahead of me. I’ll be spending it playing in Gene’s yard.

The last few days of the school year are often the best.  The books have been collected, our desks cleaned out, the windows are open all the way, the growing excitement about summer vacation is intense.  The rules are relaxed.  The last day of school, actually half
a day, we get out at 11 o’clock, is quite distinctive.  We can talk with our friends or read what we want at our desks; there's no lunch, no warm milk; a couple of kids are actually sitting on their desks.  We are only here to get our final report cards.  I do pretty well. Mostly Bs but an A in history and an A in manual training.  On the down side, Cs in arithmetic and English.  

So what.  There’s always next year in which to improve.  We 're moving upstairs for sixth grade to a room that looks on to the school yard on the corridor that leads to the lunchroom.  The Rogers is still the Fairmount but being one floor higher is going to make a lot of difference.

Two months pass. Or two minutes. It’s September of 1955.  I’m on my now familiar walk down the hill through Cleary Square to the Rogers.  I use the same side door to get into the building as I did last year, but instead of walking down a flight of stairs, I walk up a flight.  My destination is a room at the beginning of a short corridor that leads to the lunchroom.  The lunchroom is for the junior high kids. Not me.  I turn right into room 107.  Mr. Gustus’ class.  Sixth grade begins.

The room is the same size as the one in the basement, the same layout as the one in the basement, has all the same kids as the one in the basement, with one big difference.  It’s not in the basement.  I can look outside to the school yard.  If you crane a little bit you can even see some sky. The wide open space of the schoolyard lets more light in the room. The windows had shades but most of time the teacher leaves them up. For the times you wanted less light or more air in the room there was the window pole.  This was long and rounded, made of wood, the end of which had a square hook to pull down the shades, or open and close the windows by pushing up or pulling down on them.  The window pole in the corner of every classroom at the Rogers was as ubiquitous in a classroom as the roman numerals on the broken clock on the wall. 

Seats were assigned that first day, books passed out, rules explained, kids reacquainted with, the process of mourning the passing of summer under way.

Looking at my old report card from sixth grade I see there are the same number of subjects listed but unlike fifth grade I didn’t get a mark in physical education, health education, nature study, penmanship or art. I recall taking some of them. (Not nature study.)  I remember putting ink to paper still trying to master the art of penmanship and crayon and pencil to paper trying to master the art of art. But there are no grades for these subjects listed on the report card. Maybe an enlightened Boston school committee had decided it would be in a child’s best interest not to give a grade in subjects requiring natural ability or skilled small motor control as a way to encourage efforts in activities like music or art without the pressures imposed by testing and grades. Yeah, not likely.

Still, there were enough graded subjects to increase the stress levels of a ten year-old boy.  I was awarded more As, however,  on my sixth grade report card than on my fifth grade one. I was all over the place though, going from As to Cs in just a few months in subjects like history and English. Apparently in spite of my academic ups and downs, I remained emotionally stable: all As in conduct that year and As and Bs in effort. I even made the honor roll for the November-December marking period.  Or maybe Mr Gustus was just following the lead of the school committee trying to be encouraging.

Whatever the reason, my grades were better in sixth than in fifth.  I began to think more about what I was learning.  Some of it began to make sense.

I did well in spelling.  I liked the crossover spelling words, words that were important in another subject.  In April, 1956 we were studying the Civil War.  I have a paper I wrote called “A Terrible Decision.”   I discuss the decision Robert E. Lee had to make when his native Virginia seceded from the Union.  To remain in the US Army or join the Confederacy.  “After three days of difficult struggling,” I wrote, “Lee reached an answer.  He must remain faithful to his state.”  At the end of the paper I ask, “Was Lee sorry about his decision?”  As a junior historian, I surmise, “Probably he would have remained loyal to his state even if the outcome of the Civil War had appeared hopeless from the start.”

Two days after writing the paper I take a spelling test.  Some of the words are: plantation, slavery, secede, blockade, and amendment.  Twenty in all. I only get one wrong.  General Lee would have been proud.  

Prior to sixth grade, I was indifferent to poetry. That changed the morning I came into the classroom to find lines from a poem called Trees written on the blackboard.  It was by Joyce Kilmer.  Initially all I could think about was the poem was written by a man. Isn’t Joyce a girl's name, I thought.  And it had a line about the “earth’s sweet flowing breast” which, to me, living in somewhat repressed times, was, if not shocking, at least disquieting.  It also pointed out how little I knew about the world.

Beyond those first impressions, my basic belief that poetry was boring, that many of the words did not mean what they should, and that a poem was meant to be read silently to yourself, remained unchanged.  That is until the teacher read the poem aloud and led a discussion about poetic meaning.

This was a pivotal moment for me.  First, when it was read aloud, the poem sounded like a song, the cadence was musical. But it was when our teacher started asking questions, “How can a tree have arms, how can a tree have hair?”  I began to understand a poem may have greater meaning to impart than I had ever imagined.  And Trees isn’t even a great poem.  The last line, “Poems are made by fools like me, But only God can make a tree,” revealed itself to me on several levels: as a ten year-old, “Yeah, that is so true.”; as someone who was surprised and delighted the poet would admit to everyone he was a fool; and as someone who was beginning to grasp the larger message, strive as we might, nature, or the world, or fate, always has the upper hand.  I didn’t rush right out to the library and grab books of poetry off the shelves but my brief introduction to this poem was the beginning of a life-long interest in poetry that continues to this day.

Another time our teacher was talking about how complicated even the simplest things actually are.  As an example he said to imagine there was someone in the class who did not know how to play checkers.  We were to write down the instructions to the game so that this person could understand how to play.  “Easy,” I am thinking. “You move around the board jumping people, taking away their checkers.  Wait.  How do I explain kings, putting one checker on top of the other.” I didn’t even get that far. I immediately got stuck just trying to describe the game setup, what the board looked like and, even worse, what checkers were and why they were two different colors.  I had no idea how to describe jumping and making kings. The exercise was an effective method of illustrating the teacher’s point. Nothing is simple.  Everything is layered with complexity.  I was thankful he had not asked us to explain Monopoly.

Arithmetic continued to baffle me. I could do most of the problems but by the fourth or fifth subtraction or seventh or eighth multiplication problem,  the tedium got to me.   That’s why I make errors; I am trying to get through the exercises too quickly.  Much more interesting to me than the numbers were the names given to the numbers in various problems.  A subtraction problem may be 8923 minus 6172. Ok. Boring. Then I learn the first series of numbers has a name, the minuend.  The second is called the subtrahend.  The answer is the difference.  In an addition problem, each line of numbers is called an addend.  The answer is the sum of these addends.  

Somehow these terms didn’t make these operations more difficult; they made them easier. It was still boring getting all the answers, but I was pleased I knew the “real” names for what I was doing.  It made differentiating among the operations specific in my mind.  “Oh yeah, I can jumble the addends any which way and still come up with the answer; if the minuend is smaller than the subtrahend, then I’m going to go negative.”

It got even more interesting with multiplication.  The multiplicand times the multiplier.  The end result is a product.  In ninth grade algebra, we started with a product and then figured out what the multiplicands and multipliers were, except they had a new name, factors. 

Divisor and dividends showed up in division.  The answer is a quotient.  What’s left over is a remainder.  To check the answer, (I hated doing that. Wasn’t it enough work just finding the answer?) you would multiply the quotient by the divisor to get the dividend.  Now to check a division answer you’re making quotients multiplicands, divisors became multipliers, and dividends changed over to products.  Hmmm. Are multiplication and division somehow related?  No one specifically told me they were. It wasn’t until much later that I realized the connection. Arithmetic might have come easier if I had known such things.

Still, I did better in arithmetic in sixth grade than fifth. Had my math education ended at sixth grade, I’d have felt successful. But the train I was on was a long way from its destination.  There’s a lot of track to follow, all the way up through twelve grade. Along the way there’ll be trestles out, derailments, red signals that could easily have been green. The difficult journey disrupts any chance I might have had of making it all the way to the end of the line with a fuller understanding of the philosophy of math, how it’s all connected, it’s predictive powers, and its essential understandability. 

I blame the system, my teachers, the world, fate, nature, Joe Friday. Everyone but me.  Writing about my school days makes me realize how little I applied myself. I was smart enough but never motivated enough.

Now that I am blaming people for my academic woes, I’ll add Austin Palmer (No, not Austin Powers!) to the list.  He’s the one responsible for the penmanship exercises I struggled with in grade school. I can be grateful in some ways I did not have to deal with the previous method of cursive training, the Spencerian Method with it’s elaborate embellishments, curves and stylizations. An example: the Coca Cola trademark. The Palmer method came into its own as a simplified version of Spencerian. In the Palmer, you moved your whole arm to write, using the fingers just to hold the pen. 

It sounds easy enough, even graceful.  I struggled with it.  It seemed incongruous to me to use my arm when my wrist and fingers could more easily do the job. Wrist, fingers or arm, it didn’t make much difference. I still wasn’t producing the easy swirls, looping circles and curving lines of the letters illustrated in the workbook.  My capitols were actually not that bad.  Except for the Q which in the Palmer method looked like a giant 2 or the X in which a backward 9 and a 6 were doing an odd dance together and particularly the Z which combined parts of the Palmer F for the top and the Palmer J for the bottom. 

If the language were all capitols I’d get Bs on my report card in penmanship.  But no.  There were those pesky small letters to deal with. I’d have points taken off tests for forgetting to dot the small j; for  confusion over whether my m looked too much like an n and vice versa; for making my a and o too much alike.  Then there was the g and q inconsistencies, and the nagging question I was often asked: “Is that a ‘u’, a ‘v’, or a ‘w’?”

The Palmer method was supposed to bring speed and efficiency to cursive.  Some even thought the method would enhance character and reform delinquents.  The only thing I was delinquent about was spending more time fussing with my pen in the ink well than attending to my p’s and q’s on the paper.

There wasn’t too much time for staring out the window in 6th grade.  I was always responding to a series of commands.  “Take out your history books.”  “Use only pencil.”  “Today we're going to drill for the letter L.”  “Turn to chapter 7.”  “Write out an answer for every other study question.”  “Do the exercises on page 31.”  “Do the first ten now and the rest for homework.”  “Read chapter four and then answer the questions at the end.” “Divide 9376 by 381.”  “Speak louder.”  “No talking”. “Keep your hands to yourself.”  “Keep your eyes on your own paper.” “Stand when you are asked to recite.” “Do it this way.” “Don’t do this.” "Don’t!”

Sometimes school was fun. A kid I knew, and with whom I would form a friendship right through high school, was interested in comics.  Not just the “funny books” that were so prevalent.  Paul had his sights higher.  He liked satire.  “What’s that?” I wondered.  “It’s when someone makes fun of something, like a movie or TV show. Then they write their funny version to make it seem like the real version, except for the funny parts.  And it’s all drawn out in a funny way.”  OK.  What!?

One afternoon he brought in a book that showed what he was talking about.  It was the size of a small paperback like the ones on racks in every drug and variety store.  It was titled Tales Calculated to Drive You Mad. Mad was a comic book before it became a magazine.  This book was a compilation of some of the parodies from past comics.  I knew comics. Disney, Batman, Little Lulu. But what Paul showed me was nothing like any of those.  My first reaction was astonishment.  The parodied characters, although familiar to me, were definitely odd.  Weird is a better word.  Grotesque is even more accurate.  Everything was exaggerated. People looked disheveled, misshapen, ghoulish. 

I’d read Archie and Jughead comics, the amusing misadventures of two kids in high school, their girl friends and principal.  The Mad version in this book was called Starchie.  It was a world and half away from what I was used to.  Here the two teens are portrayed as slouching, cynical adults with cigarettes dangling from their mouths.  The principal is seen as a psycho lecher chasing shapely, large-breasted girls through the hallways.  The school is in disarray.  In one panel there is a ticking bomb in front of the principal’s office.  Wow.  So this is satire. I didn’t realize it then but my perspective of what people considered funny began to change.  

Then there were the sexual undertones.  In Superduperman, Lois Lane was a knockout, one of those super-figured women I had only seen in the Lil Abner comics in the newspaper.  I’m eleven. I wasn’t sure what to make of her but I liked looking.

I did like the one called Dragged Net, for obvious reasons.  Joe’s partner was named Ed Saturday. The captain is speaking “We’ve got an A.P.B on an M.O. from P.D.Q. on the B.V.D.  A man’s missing.  There’s bullet holes in his apartment. Your job.  Get the killer, Joe.”  The captain then stabs his finger into Joe’s eye.  Looking back, some of this stuff might only appeal to a young kid.  But there was a mania running through it, a desire to take these familiar characters to places they had never been to, or would ever want to go to. Both intrigued and repelled, I still went along for the ride.

In sixth grade I am transitioning from a ten to an eleven year-old. Adulthood is a some distance away but I’m closer to it than I was at the Fairmount or the Mendell. Part of me wanted to be more grown up and read the Mad magazine parodies but another part of me remembers with fondness a different book I enjoyed that year, The 500 Hats of Bartholomew Cubbins.  It’s one of the few books by Dr. Seuss written in prose rather than metered verse. I liked the brash anti-authoritarianism it fostered, even though I would not have been able to articulate that then. (Maybe that’s what also appealed to me in the Mad book.)

Bart as I called him is walking down the street.  The king goes by.  Bart is ordered to take off his hat.  He does.  Except there’s another hat under the first one.  That comes off.  Another hat, then another!  The king orders Bart to a dungeon where he is in danger of losing his head.  The hats become more elaborate.  Fortunately for Bart there is a final hat, this one studded with rubies and elaborate feathers. The king forgives Bart, buys the hat, thus making Bart rich.  I liked it for the suspense.  Is Bart going to lose his head over a hat? And the whole thing was loopy.  Like the Mad satires.

Every once in a while, it all came together.  School becomes the ideal: enjoyable, enlightening, satisfying.  For that I have to thank three guys and a hotel room.

This is one of those moments in school I remember most clearly.  As is often the case, it wan’t planned.  We had some time left late one afternoon before dismissal. In those 15 minutes, Mr. Gustus told us this story.  Three men go into a hotel.  They want to share one room.  The desk clerk tells them the room is $30. (This is obviously a very old story or a very cheap hotel.) The men each pay $10 and go up to the room.  A while later, the clerk, apparently a very honest guy, realizes he made a mistake. The room is only $25. He sends the bellboy up to the room with a refund of the $5.  On the way, the bellboy can’t figure out how to evenly divide the $5 among the three men.  (Apparently he only has a sixth grade education.)  So he gives each of the men a dollar and keeps two dollars for himself as a tip.  

Mr. Gustus then throws a curve at his unsuspecting class. “So this means each man really spent only $9 for the room for a total of $27.”  I imagine at this point we’re all nodding our heads up and down wondering where all this is leading.  “The bellboy kept $2.  So add that to the $27 dollars and you get $29. Wait  a minute.  The original cost was $30.  Where's the missing dollar?”

Obviously there is no missing dollar. This a classic misdirection riddle. There are two situations happening concurrently.  Money spent.  Money returned.  The men did not spend $27 for the room, they spent $25.  Of the $5 returned, the men got $3, the bellboy stiffed them for $2.  25+3+2=30.  

Right.  Try to tell that to a classroom of kids suddenly invigorated by this mystery.  It just seemed so logical to us that a dollar had suddenly disappeared.  We would keep going over it, trying to figure it out. “Yeah, they spent $27, the bellboy took $2.  That’s $29. There’s no way.  A buck is missing.”

Some of the explanations bordered on the ludicrous.  “The bellboy really took  $3 but he dropped a dollar on the stairs.”  “He gave the dollar back to the clerk.”  “He’s lousy at math.” “Like us.”  We didn’t really want to apply logic to this situation.  We were kids.  We wanted the solution to be dramatic, exciting. We loved the mystery more than any answer. I am especially impressed this a math problem but without columns or rows.  It has words! (Of course, that bubble burst with the introduction of mixture problems in the years ahead.)

If in fact Mr. Gustus explained what happened, I don’t remember what he said.  I do remember how the class was energized, puzzling this out, thinking as a group, cooperating.   We were all brought together in a way I had never experienced before. We’re talking out loud. Thinking. Laughing. Involved.  The slow readers with the fast, the artists with the scribblers, the cliques and the outcasts, even the nappers were awake. This is fantasy school. For a few minutes it is actually is real.

It’s late in the spring. Another school day is over.  I am out in the corridor.  To my right is the lunchroom.  In a few months I’ll be eating there with all the other seventh graders.  I walk past a row of lockers.  Come September, that’s where my coat will go, maybe a few books. I’ll need a combination lock.  I stop for a moment, look into a classroom.  Maybe I’ll have history in here and English in the classroom next door.  Every hour it will be something different.  Lots of new teachers.  New challenges.  I wonder if I am up for it. 

I am outside the school walking down the sloping driveway to the sidewalk, past the library, heading toward Cleary Square.  There are other kids around me, some carrying books, some with the coats they needed early this morning  slung over shoulders.  There are older kids, eighth and ninth graders.  That will be me one day.  

I’m through the square.  It’s warm.  I like the feel of the sun on my face.  I stop at the bridge, look down at the dark waters of the Neponset River.  I see a small stick floating in the water, midstream, upriver.  I wait as it gets closer so I can watch it pass under the bridge.

The stick is me.  It’s coming from the past, drifting toward an uncertain future. That's how I feel staring down at it.  Elementary school is coming to an end.  I wonder if I got enough out of it.  Am I prepared for what is ahead?  A shiver passes through me.  Excitement. Trepidation as well.

I stare down at the water for a few long minutes. I’ve got to be getting home.  Walking up the hill I remember someone telling me you can buy ice cream for dessert at the Roger’s lunchroom.  That, at least, is something to look forward to.